China

Submitted by Koos Jansen via BullionStar.com,

Withdrawals from the vaults of the Shanghai Gold Exchange, which equal Chinese wholesale gold demand, in week 46 accounted for 49 tonnes. Year to date withdrawals have reached 2,362 tonnes.

As part of the wide analysis of the Chinese domestic gold market I would like to share that since the seventies there is a special army in China dedicated to gold. It’s called The Gold Armed Police – if you can read Chinese have a look at this Wikipedia page.

As several CSRC officials have learned over the past four months, being a “connected guy” vis-a-vis the Politburo does not necessarily mean you are immune when Xi and the Party decide it’s time to make an example of a few “chickens” in order to scare some “monkeys.” 

When we first detailed the link between a devaluing currency, increasing restrictions on outflows of China capital, and Bitcoin, the virtual currency soared (driven by Chinese flows, just as predicted). The last few days, as China has once again started devaluing its currency, authorities once again moved to tighten capital outflows - this time through caps on credit-card withdrawals (as warned here) - and sure enough, Bitcoin has been soaring recently.

One of the catalysts for today's selloff was the thoroughly unexpected announcement by the Chinese Foreign Exchange Trade System (part of the PBOC), which as we said earlier, hints at substantially more devaluation of the Chinese currency, a currency which as is well-known, is pegged to a dollar which has been soaring in the past year, and which many believe will continue to soar after the Fed hikes rates.

This is what the CFETS said:

We have been almost alone in our exclamations at the collapsing offshore Yuan in the last few days but since The IMF blessed China's currency with inclusion in The SDR, CNH is down 13 handles. However, now we appear to have an answer. Overnight saw commentary from CFETS (China's FX market 'manager') that indicated implicitly that Trade-Weighted Yuan was still trading too high.